It's here - the one show that unites the globe

In early 1994, Osama bin Laden spent three months in London, where he visited supporters and bankers and went to watch the famous soccer club Arsenal four times.

Before returning to Sudan, just a step ahead of being extradited to Saudi Arabia, he bought his sons gifts from the club's souvenir shop.

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His affection for the game did not stop him from getting involved in a plot to massacre the American and English teams at the 1998 World Cup in France; still, bin Laden told friends he had never seen passion like that of soccer fans.

This seems to have been a common view inside al Qaeda. On the videotape the US Defence Department released in December of bin Laden reminiscing with a foreign sheik about the September 11 attacks, soccer crops up twice. The first time, bin Laden recalls a follower telling him a year earlier: "I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!" In the dream, al Qaeda won the game.

On the same videotape, another al Qaeda member recounts watching a television broadcast of the World Trade Centre attacks. "The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living room. They exploded with joy. Do you know when there is a soccer game and your team wins? It was the same expression of joy."

Bin Laden and his henchmen had hit on a truth about soccer. The sport arouses collective passions that are matched by nothing short of war. And unlike any other sport - indeed, unlike almost any cultural phenomenon - soccer is distinguished by its political malleability. It is used by dictators and revolutionaries, a symbol of oligarchy and anarchy. It gets presidents elected or thrown out, and it defines the way people think, for good or ill, about their countries.

The World Cup, which began last night in Japan and in South Korea, will be watched by billions. The spread of satellite dishes has taken the world's best teams to the farthest-flung places. People in Shenyang or Khartoum, who have no idea that Manchester is a town in England, now support Manchester United. A statue of the team's star, David Beckham, adorns a Buddhist temple in Bangkok.

Osama bin Laden, if he is alive, will presumably be among those billions sitting in front of the television, and all of them, with the exception of most Americans, will appreciate the roiling political context in which the game is so often played.

Leaders everywhere attach themselves to soccer. In 1986, Silvio Berlusconi, then an Italian media mogul, took over his favorite club, AC Milan, which was struggling to surmount a 1979 bribery scandal. By 1989, Milan was rich, organised and champion of Europe. Mr Berlusconi then founded the political party Forza Italia (named after a soccer chant), called his candidates the Azzurri ("the Blues", nickname of the national team) and, in 1994, got himself elected prime minister.

The far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider has buffed up his image as a regular guy by presiding over the FC Karnten soccer club; Brazilian politicians habitually campaign in shirts of favourite clubs; and in British local elections this month, the town of Hartlepool, given its first chance to elect a mayor, rejected the ruling Labour Party candidate in favour of the local soccer team's mascot, a man in a monkey suit.

But perhaps the best place to observe the interplay of soccer and politics today is Argentina, whose national team has twice won the World Cup and is the joint favourite with France to win this one, and whose economy is plunged into a depression deeper than that of the US in the 1930s.

On a grey English day last November, a moustachioed Argentinian multi-millionaire named Mauricio Macri visited Oxford University. Like Mr Berlusconi in Italy, Mr Macri took over a famous but struggling soccer club - Boca Juniors from Buenos Aires, which became for a time the best in Latin America. Now, seven years later, Mr Macri has decided to enter politics, and, over lunch, he explained that he would first try for governor of Buenos Aires, and after that, who knew?

A month after this conversation, the Argentine peso collapsed. The country's middle class was ejected into the Third World, four presidents fell in a fortnight and demonstrations erupted against Argentina's politicians, its banks and the International Monetary Fund. Soon a fashion emerged: protesters began wearing the national team's famous blue-and-white striped shirt with "Basta! - Enough!" - written on the back. The last vestige of Argentine glory - its soccer team - was being used to humiliate the establishment.

By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires late last month, Mr Macri, although he as yet held no political office, was in Washington discussing the catastrophe with members of Congress and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. Many Argentinians told me that before long Argentina might have its first "soccer president".

If the national team is being used as an instrument of dissent, in 1978, when Argentina won the World Cup, the ruling generals fanned a nationalist euphoria, which distracted the public from the torture and "disappearances" of thousands of "subversives".

On the night of the 1978 final, Graciela Daleo, a political prisoner at the time, was put in a car and driven around a celebrating Buenos Aires by her captors. Sticking her head out through the roof of the car, she realised that were she to shout: "Help me! I've been disappeared!", none of the people in the streets would hear her or care.

Recalling that night, an Argentine general named Enciso told me: "All the country was on the streets. Radicals embraced with Peronists, Catholics with Protestants and with Jews, and all had only one flag: the flag of Argentina!" He said the mood was repeated during the Falklands war four years later. So similar were the emotions that the official World Cup song, Vamos, vamos Argentina (Go, go, Argentina) was cranked out for the war.

While many in Argentina seem to feel that their country's crisis is irreparable, Argentina's players seem to believe that winning the World Cup this year could once again rejuvenate their country. In recent years, they have often entered the field carrying a banner in support of schoolteachers or employees of Aerolineas Argentinas or some other stricken cause.

This may be the world's only entirely left-wing national team. Half-back Javier Zanetti has opened a home for hungry children and, when I was in Argentina, forward Claudio ("the Louse") Lopez pronounced: "We want to win the World Cup for the people. I swear that first comes the shirt and only after that the players, because everything this group has done was to bring joy to the people, nothing more."

Soccer, according to an old quasi-Marxist notion, is the opium of the people, used by rulers to manipulate the masses. Certainly rulers try. Benito Mussolini often posed with Italy's soccer stars - world champions in 1934 and 1938 - and the balcony scene with the team has become a global ritual.

It is a rare dictator who ignores soccer. Various members of the Ceausescu family adopted their own Romanian clubs; Saddam Hussein's son Uday has had Iraq's players tortured after crucial defeats; Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, honorary chairman of Dynamo Moscow, had players of rival clubs sent to Siberia. Even Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson partly blamed England's surprise defeat in the World Cup for his fall in the general election of 970 a few days later.

But rulers do not have soccer to themselves. Like the ball itself, the game is always being contested. It can just as easily be used by masses against rulers, particularly in places where the masses have few other means of expression - for instance, in the new American hunting grounds of the Gulf and the Middle East. If the Bush administration wants to track the undercurrents in countries like Iran, Libya or Afghanistan, it must follow soccer.

"The last display of public discontent and resentment towards the (Libyan) government," reported the US State Department in 1999, "occurred when a riot broke out over a penalty called at a soccer match in Tripoli on July 9, 1996. The rare instance of public unrest began when a contentious goal was scored by a team that Gaddafi's sons supported and the referee called the play in their favour."

Fans started chanting anti-Gaddafi slogans, whereupon the ruler's sons and their bodyguards began shooting and the crowd stampeded on to the streets. The government later admitted that eight people had died, while others spoke of up to 50 deaths.

The man who has given Libyan soccer its particular piquancy is Al Saadi Gaddafi, the colonel's soccer-mad son. Al Saadi, who this year persuaded his father to buy a stake in the great Turin club Juventus, not only supports and finances the Libyan team, Al Ahli, but also has often played for it.

This means that the only place in Libya where tens of thousands can gather to oppose a symbol of the regime is the stadium at Al Ahli matches. When a donkey wearing a team shirt with the No. 10 was kicked on to the pitch during one game last season, everyone understood that it represented Al Saadi.

The game probably matters even more in Iran, a state gripped in recent years by what has been called "a soccer revolution." This began in 1997, when the Iranian team beat Australia to qualify for the '98 World Cup. Thousands of women broke into the stadium to join the celebrations, some removed their veils and, at street parties across the country, men and women danced and kissed, defying government warnings.

Last autumn, as Iran again looked as if it would qualify for the World Cup, the street parties resumed. Initially the fans just seemed to be expressing national pride, but in some towns the mood changed. Fans attacked state-owned banks and other public buildings, chanting: "Death to the mullahs". Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were arrested over several nights.

Eventually Iran had only to beat tiny Bahrain, a team it should have dominated, to qualify for the World Cup. The tournament would have brought weeks of street parties and demonstrations.

So when Iran lost the game 3-1, rumours abounded in Teheran that the mullahs had pressured the players to lose, in what may be a unique case of a regime wanting its national team to fail. No one knows, but Iran's forwards appeared so unwilling to try to score that at one point the Iranian television commentator exclaimed: "Why doesn't someone shoot that ball?"

In November, in a play-off against Ireland, Iran failed in its last attempt to reach the World Cup. Nicola Byrne, an Irishwoman who was among the 40 or so women admitted to the Teheran stadium by special dispensation of the Iranian authorities, would later report in London's Observer: "Under an enormous mural of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranians ripped out and set fire to seats, tore down banners depicting images of the country's senior mullahs and trashed the windscreens of several hundred cars outside."

In countries like Iran, soccer fandom is replacing cigarette smoking as the iconic image of Western youth culture. A British friend of mine was approached on the street in the Iranian town Isfahan last fall by a student who bombarded him with questions: "You are from England? After Israel and America, you are our biggest enemy. Don't you think George Bush is the biggest terrorist of all for supporting Israel? Do you think Beckham should play on the right for Manchester United, or in the centre?"

Trying to answer at least the last two questions, my friend said: "Sure. On the right?"

"What?" said the flabbergasted student, "And Paul Scholes in the centre?"

Of course, the poorer and more suppressed a country, the more the game matters. The coming World Cup will not revolutionise politics in Belgium, Sweden or the US, yet soccer has extra dimensions even in Western democracies. The national team is the nation made flesh.

When people debate the style theirs should play - and in many countries this debate rages ceaselessly - they are often arguing about the kind of country theirs should be.

Should Brazil play its traditional freewheeling game and hang the rules, or should it adopt a more "machinelike" European style?

In England, over the past 10 years, the soccer debate has strangely mirrored the political debate. While politicians argued over whether to ditch tradition in the shape of the pound and adopt the euro, in soccer the debate was about ditching the traditional muscular British game for a more cerebral European style.

The debate over the euro continues. But in soccer, the traditional English way failed. Its last exponent, Kevin Keegan, a great player of the 70s, resigned as national team manager after a home defeat to Germany in October 2000. He was succeeded by a studious-looking Swede, Sven Goran Eriksson, who got England playing thoughtful soccer that culminated in September in a 5-1 thrashing of Germany in Munich. ("Munich 1-5: Two World Wars and One World Cup," say the T-shirts in English pubs.)

If Eriksson returns from the World Cup still a hero, he will have made a "yes" vote in any referendum on the euro that much more likely. This may sound absurd, but remember that when England plays a big World Cup match, half the population watches on television, while only a handful of economists even pretend to grasp the technicalities of the euro. For most people, the question of whether to join the currency boils down to gut feelings about the vague concept of "Europe".

Over the next five weeks, billions of people across the globe will be waking in the middle of the night to watch their teams play on TV. Businesses will close, televisions in cafes and bars will be constantly tuned to the games, whole nations will be focused on soccer above all else. Osama bin Laden may have no profile in soccer today beyond a song heard occasionally earlier this season from the Arsenal stands - He's hiding near Kabul/He loves the Arsenal/Osama/Oh oh oh oh" but he has already transformed this World Cup. He and other terrorists know that the World Cup is the place where they can make their biggest mark.

Why, they will be powering up the generators and gathering behind the neighbourhood's one TV set to watch it themselves.

But it is more likely that the tournament will be what it always is: a carnival of peoples, the one place where Swedes, Russians, Tunisians and Ecuadoreans will hug and kiss and swap shirts on neutral soil.

Even Americans will be allowed to join the party. If the US forward Clint Mathis scores a beautiful goal, Iranians, Iraqis and Libyans will rave about it. Soccer has many uses, and one of them, fleeting as it may be, is universal love.

Simon Kuper writes for The Financial Times and The Observer and is the author of Football Against the Enemy.